Due to a long-running controversy, the genuine cdrtools is not available in debian repos. wodim, which replaces it, is known to be buggy and ill-maintained. So I always install the genuine cdrtools. If you have burning problems, the genuine cdrtools may cure them.

Below are my steps for doing so on Aptosid. This is rather hackish - purists prepare to cringe. This builds cdrtools, installs a dummy package, and removes wodim. At some point I may try to make a proper package for it. Since it's not in a package, you may need to rebuild it when libraries change (although I've been doing this awhile on several distros and haven't had a problem).

Code:

# get the latest cdrtools - currently 3.01a03
wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-3.01a03.tar.bz2

I've been playing around with this too and have a different solution that might be less invasive.
I leave the fake cdrecord -> wodim link in /usr/bin because at some point hopefully it will be replaced by the real cdrecord. What I do is put /opt/schily/bin ahead of $PATH in .bashrc Here are the steps I suggest: